Category Archives: issue

Our next scheduled maintenance window will be on Thursday, Feb. 2, 2017 beginning at 1:00 am and estimated completion by 7:00 am.

In an effort to increase performance, stability and security for Blackboard the normally scheduled maintenance window for will need to be extended for a few hours. Recent security concerns have driven Blackboard to release this update ahead of the normal release schedule and is strongly urged to apply this update at our earliest convenience. We acknowledge the shutdown length poses an inconvenience for many, but it is crucial to address the concerns.

Along with the important Security updates this particular update will also resolve a few of our issues that have just recently become an annoyance with faculty and OLAT. We acknowledge the fact that these workarounds are not perfect. These workarounds will not be needed after the shutdown.

In the interim, when dealing with the discussion board issue, faculty have a few options:

1.) Make the discussion board available, make your changes, then make it unavailable again (if desired).

2.) If you don’t want the students to post yet or no longer want the forum to be available for students to post to, use the manage option from the pull down menu and make all of your students readers instead of participants. This will limit the students from making any new postings, while leaving the discussion board available for them to read, review, and learn from their peer’s posts.

3.) If grading an unavailable discussion board, grade using the option in the pull down menu or proceed with the previous step making the students readers instead of participants. You will then be able to read all the postings in context.

In the interim, when dealing with the Grade Center issue faculty can:

Issue 2: Involves the Grade Center and navigating away from a grading attempt. The “Exit” and “Save and Exit” buttons are not functioning correctly. In addition, when moving through the student’s tests, you are presented with a leave or stay on the page message.

1.) Completely exit one student’s quiz and get back to Grade Center by clicking a button completely out of Grade Center (such as Announcements or Lesson Button) or the Grade Center breadcrumb and then return to the Grade Center

2.) When grading an attempt and you have the option of leaving or staying on the page instead of saving and submitting, choose leave. The grade will be recorded and one can move on to the next student’s attempt.

We appreciate your patience during this longer than normal, but very important update. A reminder abridged E-mail will follow closer to scheduled date.

On Tuesday, January 3rd the ShareStream server will be down for maintenance and an upgrade. This means any media (videos or audio) uploaded to ShareStream will not play and no media (videos or audio) will be able to be uploaded to the server while the upgrade is taking place on the 3rd. The maintenance and server upgrade will allow for a new user interface to be released later in the month and increased functionality, but basic operation will not change. We apologize for any inconvenience this may pose to you.

Hi All – Blackboard is back up and functioning normally. The problem seems to have occurred between about 7:30 and 8:50, so if your students reported problems during that time, that is what they are referring to. They should no longer be experiencing problems, but if they are, please contact us at eLifacultysupport@tri-c.edu or 987-4257.

The details of the issue have also been added to the Bb Server Status Log, available on the Blackboard tab of My Tri-C Space for faculty to view.

Blackboard was functioning very slowly this morning, so we did a restart. It appears to be getting online correctly, however we’ll update everyone once we can confirm everything is fully up and functional.

We’ll provide further updates as soon as we have more information. – With thanks for your patience and understanding! – Sasha

Our ITS department has been diligently working with Blackboard to come to a resolution on the Course Reporting issue. Blackboard was able to provide some solutions that have been applied in our Test system. We will notify faculty as soon as new information arises.

The “Student Overview for Single Course” and “Course Activity Overview” reports are not currently working for Spring 2014 Blackboard courses. We have been working with ITS and Blackboard to identify the cause of the issue and resolve the problem. We will post an announcement to the blog as soon as we have an update on the status of these reports. In the meantime, faculty who have academic integrity questions about activity in their course sites can contact the Office of eLearning & Innovation at 216-987-4257 for assistance. eLi can then work with ITS to retrieve the required data.

Faculty and Students are advised not to use Internet Explorer 11 to access Blackboard at this time. Microsoft released an update to IE11 on February 11 that can cause the web browser either to crash or become unresponsive when accessing Blackboard course sites. The Office of eLearning & Innovation is working with ITS and Blackboard to address the issue. Additional updates will be posted to the blog as soon as they are available. In the meantime, anybody who uses Internet Explorer 11 is encouraged to use an alternate browser such as Firefox or Chrome.

Though we are still conducting follow-up testing, our results thus far indicate that Blackboard is functional with IE once again. A couple of small issues have been reported that we are continuing to investigate. If you notice anything atypical in IE, please contact elifacultysupport@tri-c.edu or 216-987-4257.

The browser checker has also been updated by ITS. It should more accurately reflect the compatibility of the browser you are accessing Blackboard on.

If you haven’t already, please “Follow” our blog by clicking on the button in the left-hand sidebar. You’ll be able to subscribe to updates so that when we post information, it will come directly to your email inbox. You can also use the “Search” feature to search for older posts using standard keywords (“faculty”, “support”, “SoftChalk”, etc.)

There is an identified Blackboard browser interaction issue on Internet Explorer. We are working with ITS as we speak to apply a fix and do a rolling restart of Blackboard. If you are experiencing issues with discussion forums, grade center, and a few other things, these will be resolved with this fix.

Our recommended browser for the highest usability is normally IE 9 or 10, however for the next few hours either use Firefox or turn off “Compatibility View”. Please refer to the following posts for information on recommended browsers and on cut/paste issues from Fall 2013.